On Stage

...On Stage THE ICEMAN MELTETH BY ALBERT BERMEL MAYBE IT'S time for The Iceman Cometh to go back in the freezer until some imaginative director turns up and liberates it from its author With O'Neill and his guardian-wife both dead, why keep deferring slavishly to his stage direc-ttons9 He thought he could safeguard his work by piling up all those explicit instructions for costumes, sets, period touches, gestures, and vocal inflections, he even explained how to grin, whisper and stare ("almost mockingly," "with a grim smile") To honor these things may seem like loyalty, but a director's first loyalty is to the play's possibilities, not to the author's notorious distrust of actors Harry Hope's West Side bar and its denizens are brought into richly detailed relationships by the dialogue, they do not need a literal set and activities to duplicate what the play already gives us in abundance Unyoked from its burden of visual authenticity, Iceman would become much larger than an assortment of social castaways who slump over tables and take turns at raising their heads and voices As they wobble between their sodden recoveries from whiskey, their fitful memories of a better past that never was, and their hopes for a better future they mean to do nothing about, these bleared, lost spirits add up to a portrait of purgatory O'Neill painstakingly worked his limbo out in a musical form It has two major themes, sounded by the two mam antagonists Larry Slade is a former Socialist who grew disillusioned with "the Movement" and left it, he now wishes to die and escape from the guilty feelings of having let down his old comrades His passive retreat into "foolosophical" self-contemplation has infected the other drunks and landed them in a collective lethargy But the arrival of Hickey the salesman needles them all, Larry included, out of their boozing and whimpering Before they know it, each of them is making plans to change his lite The twin themes are scored for the minor characters too, so as to give the play plenty ot instrumental and tonal variety O'Neill brings his motifs together at the end when Hickey confesses that he murdered his wife, while Parntt, a young man associated with Larry, confesses at the same time (in counterpoint) that he betrayed his mother—a leading figure in the Movement—to the police The two principals swap roles as their themes tangle Larry, who has desperately tried to keep out of everybody else's life, teels compelled to sit in judgment on Parntt, his son,' and urge him to atone for the betrayal by tailing himself, Hickey, the gabby, self-appointed conscience for everybody else, surrenders to the law O'Neill has thus composed a tone-poem about Americans He pits our innate psychological conservatism, our inclination to be thankful for what we have and to protect it from specified and unspecified threats, against our inner Dale Carnegie or Elmer Letterman, who is convinced that he can improve himself infinitely if he simply sweats hard enough The struggle between self-preservation and the urge to proselytize (a mask for the urge to succeed) allows the American soul no peace O'Neill knew that struggle at first hand and, like other superior Amencan writers—Thornton Wilder, for example, and Hemingway—strove to illuminate, to personify, its two sides, not merely in Iceman but in a string of other plays, such as Dynamo, The Great God Brown and The Hauy Ape O'Neill a composer...

...It sounds improbable We have been taught to look on him as the Last Utter Realist Iceman, however, had its realistic day in Jose Quintero's version at the Circle in the Square some years ago, the one that launched Jason Robards and kept cometh-ing around on educational TV, and the recent filmed treatment with Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan similarly took no "unrealistic" chances Theodore Mann's revival (Joseph E Levine Theater) puts a black actor in the role of Hickey—this is the extent of its novelty—and, as one would expect, James Earl Jones exerts his formidable gifts to the plav s advantage Otherwise, Mann does little moie than recapitulate and reblock the staging by Qumtero, his former partnei In spite of some good back-up performances by Tom Aldredge as Jimmy Tomorrow the journalist, Joseph Ragno as Rocky the bartender, and David Margulies, who lends Hugo the Viennese anarchist an unaccountable Russian accent, this production does not let the play sing or soar, only roar The favored adjective in O'Neill criticism is "powerful " This means, in Mann's production as always, that the actors noisily harangue one another (and the audience) or else transpose frequently from murmur-ing to shouting in order to "dramatize" the material But high-decibel counts do not reach O'Neill's music, much less his lealism We have moved into a new era ot directing, abandoning the notion articulated by Nigel Dennis in 1963 (very late in the game) when he wrote, "The highest praise a director can receive is congratulations for appearing to have contributed nothing whatever to the play " We now realize that a director cannot avoid contributing to a play, even if it be no more than his ineptitude Not long ago in England I saw The Shrew, a drastic remodeling of The Taming of the Shrew undertaken by the Open Space company led by Charles Marowitz, an American-born director and critic Kiss Me, Kate it isn't Marowitz has pared down his cast to six actors, squeezed out the banter in the comedy, and conceived the action as the brutahzation of Kathanna by a sadistic, mercenary Petruchio With its many stylized elements The Shrew left some London critics uneasy, they saw it as a taming ot the Bard I found it a first-rate interpretation Thelma Holt's acting as an oppressed yet defiant heroine opens the play up and acidly comments on arranged marriages and paternal intimidation The last scenes where she publicly vows to take her husband as her master, piesent her as a brainwashed prisoner, reminiscent of a Moscow-trial Mctim in the 1930s, she mouths the ordained words but her eyes tell us that, like Brecht's Galileo, she lives to fight another day Clearly, O'Neill is less pliable a writer than Shakespeare is, and therefore less susceptible to refashioning Still, only 20 years after his death we can see that directors will need to reckon with his musical structure and theatrical poetry if his plays are to live and not just be exhibited like so many fossils BY WAY OF contrast, Jay Broad's revival of Eric Bentley's Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (Riverside Church Theater) is a model of conceptual daring on the part of a director I missed the initial production of Are You Now at Yale last year but got the impression from reviews of a fairly straightforward "theater of tact" treatment, a mock-up of actual hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities Broad takes his cue from the play's subtitle, "The Investigation of Show Business' from 1947-58, and surrounds the playing area with sequentially blinking marquee bulbs, which have the further benefit of simulating the atmosphere of lighted hoopla—kliegs and strobes?created by the press and television contingent Photographs of the participants flash on to three separated screens, one compares them with the faces of the actors, a uniformly excellent cast that includes Albert Hall, Allan Miller, Arnold Soboloff, and Peter Thompson, who take on multiple roles as witnesses and Committee members The sense of reconstiuction, rather than a pretense at enactment, gives the material the feel of live documentation Indeed, that is the play's purpose As Jules Chametzky points out in the current issue of Performance magazine, to study the hearings as strictly historical events means missing the connections down to the present, the formative political years, say, of Richard Nixon Broad's artifice goes beyond reminding us that there were heroes and villains among the witnesses, it displays the United States during a liberalizing period, when its unity and liberal ideals were nevertheless being steadily undermined by the Committee's racism and anti-Semit-lsm For instance, by announcing the original Russian-Jewish or German-Jewish names ot movie celebrities hke Edward Arnold and Danny Kaye, the Committee members behaved as if they were conducting a ritual unmasking Anybody who lived through those times cannot help being fascinated and troubled by the wearing-down of Larry Parks, the comic self-abasement of Abe Burrows, the tremendous rage ot Lionel Stander, and the insinuations directed at Paul Robeson, with whose indignant testimony the play suddenly ends For a last tableau, Broad cuts the lights off and on, the actors stand transfixed like gargoyles but brimming with potential energy, as if one word from the Director Above would start the proceedings all over again As the only person in New York who has never before seen a Neil Simon play, I don't know whether to feel disappointed or justified by The Good Doctor (O'Neill Theater), which has a poster title set in quasi-Cyrillic type and is drawn (through a long straw) from some stories by Chekhov Rene Auber-jonois, Frances Sternhagen and Barnard Hughes collaborate variously and pleasantly Chnstophei Plummer, as narrator, plays a Simoman Chekhov, or Chekhovian Simon, who worries about getting writer's block, yet never about exuding overdoses of easy charm A small orchestra bumps out painless, peasanty tunes by Peter Link A J Antoon directs Exposed to so many names redolent of commercial triumphs, one recalls with a pang (who knows why...

...that Anton Chekhov was a very sick man...